[BC] Telephone--what's a telephone?

[Ira Wilner]

Dave,

More important than CPE power is putting the entire telecom network on a 
public backbone with ultimately no service security since any hacking group 
can overwhelm routers, etc. on demand and using a public protocol to do it.

Almost as important is the loss of a wireless microwave radio backbone 
across the country.  Backhoe fades are all too common.  While microwave 
relay towers might seem like sitting ducks in this day and age, though they 
could be fortified with secure perimeter fences and surveillance monitoring, 
think about the thousands of utility poles that are holding up fiber trunks, 
right out there in town and out in the boonies.

Some ISP's will boast having two or more pipes out the the main Internet 
routers in different cities.  But when you look at their own networks it's 
apparent that they have many single points of failure that'll take them down 
in spite of having more than one connection to the outside world.

Here's a funny example.  The statewide cable operator had been offering 
triple play packages, telephone, data and TV for a number of years.  When 
they suffered a major outage at their hub due to flooding you could not call 
them to let them know of your service problems because their business office 
phones were on their network.  Oops!

TCP/IP may be the way to integrate communications and make it play through a 
forest of technologies but it also makes it far more vulnerable.  You can 
bet that Darpanet will continue to have its own physically isolated network 
in spite of sharing the same packet transmission protocol of the rest of us. 
This still leaves me a bit uneasy as highly sensitive networks, including 
those operating within the power grid or the most critical facilities should 
not be using TCP/IP at all.  If someone can find an indirect way into those 
so called secure networks, if they can's speak the low level language 
protocol they'd be stopped dead in their tracks.

--Ira

-----Original Message----- 
From: Dave Dunsmoor

> Federal Communications Commission Chairman Tom Wheeler says it's
> time for America's telephone system to make the transition from
> analog to an Internet protocol-based standard.